Tales from Dystopia XXII: Apartheid and me

This is a question that has been asked on Quora, a site where people ask questions, and people who know the answers to those questions, or think they do, try to answer them.

Several questions were asked about apartheid, and some of them were quite personal, and I tried to answer some of them. I’ve now copied some of the answers here, somewhat edited. Though the questions were asked by different people, the result is a bit like an interview.

If you click on the questions themselves, they will take you to the original question and answer on Quora, but here I’ve tried to link them, and add some linking material.

I lived through the entire period of apartheid. I was 7 years old when it started and I was 53 when it stopped.

It was evil, stupid, wasteful and unjust in both its conception and in its implementation.

It was based on the premise (which I believe to be wrong) that “race” is the most important and significant thing about a person, and that every person should be arbitrarily be assigned to a “race” by the government, and that (among other things) your “race” should determine where you could live, where you could work, what work you could do (and how much you should be paid for it), where you could go to school, where you could worship, and who you could associate with.

Anyone who disagreed with this fundamental premiss, and who spoke against it, was liable to be harassed by the police (and sometimes by their neighbours who believed in the apartheid ideology), and in some cases banned, detained without trial or imprisoned.

It denied people fundamental human rights, and was enormously wasteful of human and other resources.

As a policy it was devised by the Purified National Party whose aim was to secure white Afrikaner supremacy in South Africa, and apartheid was one of the policies with which they fought (and won) the 1948 election, in which most of the voters were white and very few non-whites were allowed to vote (and under the apartheid policy the right to vote was taken away even from those few).

It could perhaps have been avoided if, at the time of Union in 1910, the right of black people to vote had been extended to the whole of South Africa, and if black people had taken part in the National Convention that had led to the formation of the Union but at that time (from about 1870–1915, the time of the New Imperialism) racism and the idea of white supremacy was very strong among those who made decisions on such things, So in part the roots of apartheid go back a long way.

Initially by repression and suppression of those who criticised apartheid, and by developing a police state.

A series of laws were passed, such as the Suppression of Communism Act (Act 44 of 1950), which gave the government power to ban organisations and their leaders to prevent them from speaking in public or even in private.

In 1961 B.J. Vorster became Minister of Justice, and he passed a series of laws that give more and more powers to the police, so that when he became Prime Minister in 1966 South Africa was a fully-fledged police state.

When P.W. Botha (who had been Minister of Defence) became Prime Minister, the focus shifted from the police to the military, and the strategy became a Total Strategy to meet what the government described as a Total Onslaught.

But after P.W. Botha became an executive president more and more members of his own party began to see that ultimately the military strategy could not work, and began to see the need for dialogue. When illness removed P.W. Botha from power, therefore the strategy changed.

That would depend on where you lived, when you were born, what your racial classification was, and what ethnic group you belonged to.

Apartheid began in 1948, but all the apartheid laws did not kick in immediately.

If would were a black child in a rural area, after Bantu Education began in about 1956 or so, you would probably have found it very much more difficult to get a decent education especially if your parents were farm workers on a white-owned farm. You would often have to walk a long distance to school.

If you were white and your parents were rich, you would have a much better chance of having a good education (that kind of thing is called “white privilege”, and to some extent it still continues today). Even if you lived far from a good school, if your parents could afford it they could send you to a boarding school.

The purpose of apartheid in South Africa was to maintain white Afrikaner hegemony in South Africa and to keep the Afrikaners separate from other groups, and the other groups separate from each other. The National Party, which developed and applied the policy of apartheid, saw itself as the sole authentic political representative of this group of people, and said that people who did not support the National Party were not true Afrikaners.

Their policy was therefore for Afrikaners to have their “own” schools, banks, youth movements, cultural institutions and so on. In order to achieve this they tried to encourage (or force) every other group to do the same. Thus they tried to impose segregation at every level.

One reason for this was that after the Second World War there was a worldwide reaction against racism, because they had seen the ugly face of racism in the Nazi party in Germany. This affected South Africa too, and there was a movement against racial segregation, to reduce it. Many returning soldiers supported this movement.

The United Party, which ruled South Africa during and immediately after World War 2 had set up the Fagan Commission, which reported that more blacks would be moving to urban areas in search of work and recommended that the government prepare for this but building improved urban housing. The National Party was resolutely opposed to this, and wanted to keep black people out of urban areas.

So the National Party introduced apartheid to stop these trends and reverse them, and to increase the separation of racial and ethnic groups. In this sense it was a reactionary trend.

The Nationalist Prime Minister who introduced the apartheid policy in 1948 was D.F. Malan. He was succeeded by J.G. Strijdom, who clearly enunciated the purpose of the apartheid policy in one word: Baasskap, White people in general, and the Afrikaners in particular, were to be the Boss.

While Malan and Strijdom were prime ministers, Hendrik Verwoerd, the Minister of Native (later Bantu) Affairs was working behind the scenes to elaborate and refine the apartheid policy and to plan for its practical implementation, and after he became prime minister in 1958, he announced his plans. In 1961 B.J. Vorster became Minister of Justice, and was in charge of the police, and turned South Africa into a police state to crush any opposition to the policy of apartheid.

There was the Communist Party (which had two members of parliament, representing black voters in the constituencies of Cape Western and Cape Eastern). For a very edifying political read, I recommend the speech of Mr Stan Khan, who I think was the member for Cape Western, at the first reading of the Suppression of Communism Bill. The Bill was passed, and became the Suppression of Communism Act (Act 44 of 1950), as a result of which Mr Khan lost his seat in parliament, and his freedom. The Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) went underground and became the South African Communist Party (SACP). Part of it remained above ground as the Congress of Democrats (COD).

There was the African National Congress (ANC), which had no members of parliament, though no doubt some of its members had voted for the Communist Party in the 1948 election. There were also the Indian National Congress and a Coloured National Congress, and they formed the Congress movement that adopted the Freedom Charter in 1955, As a result of that the leaders of the Congress Movement were arrested and charged with treason, and eventually acquitted.

There was the United Party, from which the National Party had split away and the Afrikaner Party, which had also split away from the United Party over the issue of South Africa’s participation in WW 2.

There was the Labour Party, which had originally been all white, and aimed to protect the white working class, but since WW 2 had begun to move towards non-racialism — this was seen as a threat by the National Party, which countered it by promising to protect Afrikaner workers by wooing them away from the working class into the Afrikaner nationalist fold.

There were a few other parties, but those were the main players in 1948 when apartheid started.

After 1948 the Labour Party collapsed, the Communist Party was banned, and the United Party was such a wishywashy opposition that some people formed the Liberal Party in 1953. But like the Communist Party, the only members of parliament it had were the “Natives Representatives” elected by black voters in the Cape Province, and the Natives Representatives were abolished in 1960. The Liberal Party policy was one man one vote and non-racial democracy.

In 1959 another group split from the United Party to form the Progressive Party. They thought that the right to vote should not be by race, but rather by wealth and education, so they were not racist, but classist.

Also in 1959 the Pan African Congress (PAC) split from the ANC, because they did not like the influence of white communists on the ANC and represented the African nationalist wing of the ANC. They organised protests against the passes that black people had to carry at all times, which resulted in the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, and the banning of the ANC, the PAC and several other parties and political organisations.

There were a couple more right-wing splits from the National Party, and couple more left-wing splits from the United Party (most of which eventually joined the Progressive Party). The Liberal Party was forced to disband after the Prohibition of Improper Interference Act of 1968 made multiracial political parties (and even multiracial political discussions) illegal.

There were also political parties in the “homelands” when they were formed, and political parties in the “own-affairs” tricameral parliament formed in the 1980s.

Most of the parties that had been banned in 1960 were unbanned in 1990, including the ANC and PAC.

The main differences were that Nazism stressed the leadership principle, and the need for people to be loyal to a single leader, whereas the apartheid ideology did not require this to nearly the same extent.

Also, while both were cruel and violent, the apartheid regime was not generally as violent when people obeyed its dictates. If people were, for example, forcibly removed from their homes, they were only subjected to violence if they showed signs of resistance. When the Nazis captured towns in the USSR, however, they would often massacre the Jews of the town whether they resisted or not.

The main similarities were set out by B.J. Vorster (later Minister of Police, and then Prime Minister), who said in 1942, when South Africa was at war with Germany and Italy

We stand for Christian Nationalism which is an ally of National Socialism. You may call the anti-democratic system dictatorship if you like. In Italy it is called Fascism, in Germany National Socialism, and in South Africa Christian Nationalism.

Apartheid was never applied in Botswana, which was not ruled by South Africa. It was a British Protectorate and became independent in 1966.

In Namibia there was apartheid, though it was applied slightly differently from the way in which it was applied in South Africa.

One of the of first acts of the National Party (NP) when it came to power in South Africa in 1948 was to add 6 members of parliament to the South African parliament. These were white people from South West Africa (SWA), which was what Namibia was then called, and only white people could vote for them.

In South Africa in the 1950s the NP appointed the Tomlinson Commission to study how to apply the apartheid policy, and later, in the 1960s, they appointed the Odendaal Commission to make recommendations on how to apply apartheid to SWA.

In 1969 the South African government took more direct control of Namibia. Many government departments, which had been independent and had been controlled by the local administration, came under the direct control of Pretoria. “Homelands” were demarcated, and homeland authorities were set up, though some refused to accept them.

Apartheid was particularly strong between the north and south of Namibia. It was easier to cross the border into South Africa, or even Botswana, from the south of Namibia than it was to travel to the north of Namibia. The south was known as the “police zone”.

People who lived in the north (Kaokoveld, Ovamboland, Okavango and Caprivi), if they wanted to enter the “police zone” had to have special permits, and if they wanted to work in the south they could only do so if they had a special labour contract, and these contracts were strictly controlled by SWANLA (the South W est Africa Native Labour Association). SWANLA assigned contract workers to jobs, and neither employers nor employees had much say in the matter. This led some to call the contract labour system a form of slavery, and eventually it provoked nationwide strikes in 1971.

In the 1950s I went to a church school (run by the Methodist Church) and so, though the school was only for white pupils back then, I escaped the worst of the government indoctrination to accept apartheid. And the teachers at the school, and some of the fellow pupils helped me to realise that the system was wrong.

One of my fellow pupils recommended that I read two books, Cry, the beloved country, by Alan Paton, and Blanket boy’s moon, by Peter Lanham and Mopeli Paulis.

Paton’s book was actually written before apartheid started, but it exposed the racism and inequality in South African society, which apartheid only institutionalised and made worse.

In addition, the school provided magazines and newspapers for pupils to read, and among them was Contact, the paper of the Liberal Party, which was critical of apartheid and reported news of how apartheid affected ordinary people outside the privileged environment of a church school.

Church anti-apartheid poster

Also as a schoolboy I visited a Zionist minister who lived in Alexandra township north of Johannesburg. I mainly discussed theology with him, not social conditions, but I could see the social conditions for myself as I rode through the unpaved streets with sewage running down the gutters. The inequalities in South African society were obvious, and under apartheid they were enforced along racial lines.

When I left school and went to university I was a member of an Anglican Church youth group, and the Anglican Church produced posters showing that apartheid was incompatible with the Christian faith. On Good Friday 1959 several Anglican youth groups put up these posters around Johannesburg.

So those are some of the things that made me realise that such a regime was wrong.

It took me longer to realise that I had to do something about it, and that too was connected with the Liberal Party. When I was a university student in Pietermaritzburg in the 1960s I had some friends who were members of the Liberal Party. I had a driving licence and they didn’t, so they asked me to drive them to Liberal Party meetings in rural areas. I was happy to do so. Most of the meetings were held in communities of black peasants who were under threat of forced removal because they lived in places that the apartheid bureaucrats in Pretoria had designated as “for white occupation”. Many of them had numbers painted on their houses, which were an indication of their impending removal. So I became acquainted with the ethnic cleansing entailed by the apartheid policy.

One by one the people who organised and spoke at such meetings of the Liberal Party were banned. You can read more about banning and its effects here The Banned Waggon

Eventually so many people were banned that I realised that someone needed to step into their shoes and carry on what they were doing. And one of those someones was me. Eventually I too was banned, but I went to study in the UK on the day that my banning orders were to be given to me, so never got them. On my return from study overseas my passport was confiscated, and eventually I too was banned, this time for real.

As for what I think of South Africa today, South Africa today is free. The government cannot ban people who criticise it, because we have a constitution with a bill of rights.

But there are still many problems. During the apartheid time a British friend once said, “When South Africa has sorted out the problem of the black and the white it will come face to face with the real problem, the haves and the have nots.”

And unfortunately very little has been done to sort out that problem. In recent years there has been something of a revival of the obsession with race, which is a kind of convenient distraction from the need to deal with the underlying problem: the haves and the have nots.

As for what life was like as a white opponent of apartheid, I’ve written a whole series of blog posts about that, of which this is one, and you can find the others here Tales from Dystopia

A well written article, Fr Stephen. I remember the system of Apartheid and the hurt that it caused our citizens. As a 9 year old boy I remember the assassination attempt on Prime Minister Verwoerd at the Rand Show and the tragic events of Sharpeville. I remember when as a little boy we all took part in the Union Festival marking 50 years of Union in 1960, only to celebrate the birth of the Republic in 1961. All “Imperial” and British symbols were removed from our schools. Our own Regiment’s colours had to be changed. At 16, I also remember the assassination of Verwoerd in the House of Assembly.
What a pity the euphoria around the 1994 elections has brought about a state which is now, in 2018 worse off than it was when the ANC inherited the government post Apartheid.nelson Mandela must be turning in his grave.
“Cry the beloved country” indeed.

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